Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

This is another book I reassessed after I finished reading. Like Claire North’s The End of the Day it came with high expectations, a Pulitzer prize winner no less. As with North’s book I was less than enthralled but decided to plough on and in the end was rewarded.

It takes the form of a letter to his son by an early 20th century preacher now in his dotage. In his late sixties he married a young wife and has a ten-year-old son whose adulthood he does not expect to see. For most of the book he rambles over his life, his family and his relationship with the almighty. Some of the anecdotes are not without interest, the search for his grandfather’s grave in drought-stricken Kansas and the story of the town that shifted all its houses a mile away out of embarrassment over a collapsed tunnel, for example, but hardly enough to compensate for reading a 282-page sermon. A possibility of a plot emerges a third of the way through when he discloses that his grandfather may have been involved in some shameful violence. That story dwindles as in the latter part of the book he obsesses on the malign attention his godson seems to be turning on his family. This is the son of his oldest friend, another local preacher. As a boy he was constantly committing sly misdemeanours and as a young man fathered and then denied a child with a poor local girl. He has returned middle-aged, but the reverend finds his presence no less threatening. He is as worried about his own unchristian feelings as the threat.

The book is readable, Robinson’s writing fluid and at times captivating but it is also eminently put-downable with a barely discernible momentum. It is part moral treatise, part historical document, part psychological study but only in the loosest sense is it a novel.

Nevertheless, as I turned the last page, I found myself satisfied that my time had not been wasted.